Map of LB&SCR at Victoria Station

Surviving miraculously in one of the entrances to Victoria Station in London, is this magnificent tile map of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) network dating from before the First World War.

it is a somewhat incongruous survival amidst the modern station's neon lights and coffee and fast food outlets.

A memory of the magnificence and pretensions of the pre 1914 private Railway Companies. LB&SCR was absorbed at Grouping in 1923 into the Southern Railway, which became the Southern Region of British Railways on nationaisation in 1948, and ironically enough became the Southern Railway - although in a very different form - again after privatisation in 1996.

A trace of both the bygone railway empires and indeed the British Empire I suppose.